7 Ways to Make Money from Your Website or Blog

This is episode 35 of Author Audience.

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message, create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

And in this training, I'm going to talk to you about seven ways to make money from your website or blog. Now, not all of you will use all seven of these ways, but I definitely wanted to touch on each of them and really have you start thinking of other ways that you can earn income outside of book royalties. Because it's really hard to make a full time income on book royalties. So I want you to start thinking of other things you can do. First thing I want to mention are affiliate promotions. This is something that I do and it is a significant part of my income. But what you do is you find products or services that will give you a percentage of commission as a referral fee for sending them new customers. So basically, instead of paying for advertising, they're paying you to send them new clients and customers. And it's a really great way to earn additional income. However, you want to make 100% sure that it's a high quality product or service, it should be something that you already use. You know, if you already use it, then it's something that you find valuable. And if that product or that software or that program has an affiliate program, then that would be a great thing to promote. For example, my products and services do have commission in my affiliate program. So if you're not an affiliate yet and you'd love to promote my products, that would be a great thing for you to promote to your friends. And especially if you are in the author niche, you also want to have something that you really believe in. You don't want to just do it for the money. Now, I know we all have those moments where it's like, wow, this looks really good. And you know, and you get tempted by the money. I've been there too. I've made some mistakes and I usually try to let my email list and let my audience know. For instance, I was promoting an advertising service for a KDP free promotion at one time that got really good results. I personally used them myself and I did a case study and I showed the results that I got. They were great. I mean, amazing results, a lot of paid sales afterwards. And so it was really worth it. I was promoting them and earning significant income from promoting them. However, I found out that they were doing things against Amazon's terms of service that could get your account closed. There was no way that I would continue to use a service or recommend a service that did those types of things. So I sent an email to my list, I changed the information on my blog and I let people know I'm no longer promoting them, I'm no longer using them. And this is why. So make sure you do things with integrity or else people won't trust your recommendations anymore. And if it's a recurring income, that is a huge bonus. So if you promote a membership site for instance, that is a.

Recurring cost, then you will get most likely income every month. Now some of the affiliate programs will stop after six months or it'll just be a one time referral fee. Let's say for instance when I refer people to getResponse or AWeber or email newsletter subscriber programs, then I will get an ongoing commission from those companies for as long as the person uses that service. So those types of affiliate promotions are especially powerful. Number two to monetize your high traffic pages. So look into your stats, into Google Analytics or whatever stats you're using with your website. Sometimes you can just log into your cpanel and see your stats there. But most likely your high traffic pages will be your About Me page, your recommended resources page, your contact page, Start here, services and so forth. And so start thinking about ways that you might be able to monetize those. And for instance, on a recommended resources page, that's where you can include links to your own books, products and services. You can also include affiliate links and then include anything that you highly recommend and use yourself, even if it's a free resource or it doesn't have an affiliate program. On your About Me page you could share a link to your book or to your product in that page as well. But definitely make sure you're putting links to your email list as well. But you know, start thinking about those high traffic pages. You can even think about your blog posts that are getting the most traffic. And if there's something that gets a lot of traffic, then you can specifically research affiliate programs for that. For instance, on my training authors website I created a tutorial on how to use Google Hangouts for webinars. It is a high traffic page, gets a lot of views and a lot of organic searches from Google. And so I researched some tools that I could recommend and on an almost daily, if not every other day I'm getting commissions from that blog post, from the recommendations that I made. So look at your high traffic page pages and posts on your site. So let's talk about number three sidebar Sales. Now you're not going to get your most, the most of your, the majority of your sales from your sidebar. But you definitely want to think about how you're, what you're putting in your sidebar and how you can make that the best return on investment of that, that real estate of that space. So I recommend advertising your most profitable books, programs and or services. I'm not always the greatest at doing this, but I do try to put, you know, my most popular program or my featured book. You can do those types of things. And then on training authors, we earn a lot of income.

By recommending Author Marketing Club as an affiliate. And we have a graphic in our sidebar for them. And so we put that there because it's very profitable for us. So that's something to consider. You can also put a list of your most popular posts. Now it doesn't necessarily mean that, that it's your top traffic post. You know, on your whole site. You can say my popular posts and choose the posts that actually help generate income. Like I said, my Google Hangout post generates income. My post about KDP free promotions generates affiliate income. So you can highlight those posts and they are some of the most popular posts on my site. You can highlight those in your sidebar. You could say my five top posts or my 10 top posts and so forth. Now here's an interesting thing. You can actually do a sticky post on a WordPress self hosted website. And what I recommend doing is making your sticky post. If you use this feature an epic blog post and you want it to be a post that converts readers to buyers. So you want it to be something that is creating income for you or is converting people to your email list. So how you do that on a WordPress self hosted blog is you'll click on the link for posts on the left hand side of your dashboard. Once you log into the admin section of your WordPress blog, then you'll click on the quick edit link to the post that you want to create as your sticky post and then you'll put a check mark. You'll click the box for sticky posts. So this is a screenshot for you. And let's say I wanted to make this a sticky post on shellyhits.com well then I would just click that box and click update. And then that post would always stay at the very top of my blog. So every time someone comes to my blog they'll see my tools post, which is like my resources post with all my affiliate links and recommendations and obviously all the stuff that I use and recommend. And so that is something I could do on my training authors site currently. And this can change at any time. But currently I have my free KDP promotion post as a sticky post. So it's the first post you'll see when you go there. So this is something to consider doing if you have a post that's very popular and that's converting. Well, another way to earn income from your blog is to do product review posts. So there's two ways you can do this. You can do it as a sponsored blog post. So the person actually pays you simply to do the post and the review.

There's a couple places to look for sponsors. ReviewMe.com, sponsoredReviews.com and SocialSpark.com and you'll want to put a disclaimer at the bottom of your post that it was a sponsored post. And you'll want to let your readers know that you have been paid. But you want to give your honest opinion. You don't want to just please the sponsors. I personally have not done sponsored blog posts, but I know a lot of bloggers do. Now you can also do product reviews for affiliate products that you promote. Now I have done this and if there are products that I really believe in, I really like and I really think could be helpful to my audience, I will do a specific video or a specific post on that product and that way it will drive traffic to to that product through my affiliate link where I earn commissions. Another option is advertising. I have done this on my blogs in the past. I am not doing it currently, but one of the ways that I have done it is by using the OIO Publisher plugin. You can just search for it on Google and it is a paid plugin. I think it's a one time fee. And then you set it up to be able to help automate the process of adding graphic and text link type of advertising to your blog. So it's really cool. I mean it's, you can just have it automated. Except PayPal and I did this on several of my websites previously and I did it successfully. Another place to check for advertising is buysellads.com and beaconads.com so you can sign up for an account and you can sell ad space from their website. And so those are some other opportunities to consider on your blog. The more traffic that you have to your blog, the more advertisers are going to be interested in advertising on your blog. If you're only getting 10 people visiting your blog every day, there's not a very good chance that you'll be attractive to advertisers. And then finally you want to sell your own products and services. This is really a game changer for authors to be able to have those back end products and services that you can sell from your blog and your website. The most important, and the one that I'm going to really, really emphasize that we all have is digital products. So Author Audience Academy. It's a digital product, videos, PDFs, the Facebook group. And it's a way that I can leverage myself and help a lot more people as well as grow my business. And without having to teach the course over and over and over because it's recorded, I can deliver it 24 hours a day. So digital products are really great to be able to do services, you can do project based or packages. So if there's something that you have learned to be able to create a book, to be able to publish a book, to be able to do some of the marketing, it is a service that you can sell. You can actually sell the service of formatting and publishing blog posts, you can sell the service of formatting a Kindle book, you can sell these services and you know, packages are very powerful. So you could offer an entire publishing package for somebody and there's so many different services you can offer. Speaking, so you can do speaking online, you can do webinars and teleseminars and things like that that people pay to get. And that kind of goes into the digital product realm. But then you have your in person speaking as well, where you're being paid to come and speak. Coaching, you can do one on one coaching or group coaching. Group coaching is great, a great way to leverage your time as well. But many times people want your time, they want time with you. And so that one on one coaching is a great thing to consider adding as well. You can also host your own live events like workshops. Seminars. They don't have to be fancy. You can just rent a room in your local town and have a workshop style event. But it builds credibility and authority for you. And this is something that I'm going to be doing as well. You can have paid mastermind groups. That's something that if you're a leader in your niche in your area, you can learn how to facilitate a very effective mastermind group. VIP days. These are really great ways to offer a high end service. And it can be online through Skype or Google Hangouts or something like that where you spend that time, intense one on one coaching for a VIP day, or it can be in person and you spend the entire day mapping something out, creating videos, looking over their speeches, doing some really intense work where they get a lot of value out of it. And you can charge quite a bit for VIP days. So those are seven ways to make money from your website and blog. And I hope you have the ideas rolling around in your mind now and that you've chosen at least one or two that you can start implementing right away. Lights, camera, action. It's time for this week's Take Action tip. I want you to choose at least one thing that I've shared with you today that you can implement for your website or blog.

Before we end, I want to give you a backstage pass in this Godly Gain segment. Now, when we talk about money and monetizing your website or blog, I know there's certain people in my audience that start to cringe. It's like, ugh, you mean I'm gonna be monetizing, I'm gonna be asking for money. And a lot of you are givers. You're heart based, you love to give, give, give. But money isn't wrong. And God is just really transforming a lot of how I see money and my view of money. It's okay to ask for money in exchange for our time, our services, our products, for our recommendations. It's not wrong. In fact, the Bible says in First Timothy 6:10, for the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. So money isn't the root of all evil. It's the love of money. And so it's when money becomes that love, that primary thing in your life, that's when it's when it becomes the root of all evil. Money in and of itself is good. The more money we have, the more we can give. And just like a doctor isn't going to go to work and just work for free unless they're a missionary or doing some pro bono work, you shouldn't be expected as a creative to work for free. You should be expected to be able to be paid and compensated for what you do and to be able to gladly receive that quality compensation for the gifts that God has given you.

My hope and my prayer is that this episode is bringing you one step closer to being able to shine and reach more people with your message. Growing your business as you change lives is an amazing thing. When you're able to to make money while you change lives, while you use the gifts that God has given to you. It is an amazing privilege and an amazing gift and so I encourage you to use what God has given to you to the best of your abilities.

This month in Author Audience Academy, I am leading a seven day website Makeover challenge and I encourage you to join us. You can join us@authoraudienceacademy.com and this will be an evergreen challenge. It will be in the members area available at any time, no matter when you join Author Audience Academy. But if this is something that is your focus right now, to really be able to optimize and maximize your website and to really be able to sell more books and grow your business, I encourage you to join us@authoraudienceacademy.com thank you so much for joining me in this episode and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.